We've posted about some extremely unsafe toys here. the one that came to mind immediately when I saw the title of this Cracked post was the Atomic Energy Lab, and it's included. But the others are just as shockingly dangerous! However, I remember some of them from my own childhood, the childhood with no seat belts or bicycle helmets or minimum age for babysitting. Shown here is a kit for children to learn how to melt and mold their own lead, which could not only burn a hole through flesh, but poison your brain as well. NSFW text. Link

Yes, Sharrydan, because we never had those things when you were five years old.

The thing about safety is that your whole generation wasn't going to die out because you didn't wear helmets or fall in the river. But some kids did. the thing about safety is trying to protect that small percentage of kids who did die doing the stuff that didn't harm YOU when you were a kid. The kids who got their heads crushed in or who were murdered or poisoned or fell in rivers aren't around to say, "I used to do that, and I didn't get hurt". Why? they're dead. But hey, you're okay, and that's all that matters, right?

I did the sinkers, and the mercury from thermometers. And lead free-form casting by pouring lead in water. We did not think or even know about the dangers.

At times I wonder how our generation has been able to survive at all. We did not wear helmets when riding bicycles, had not heard anything about car belts. I was fishing on a river bank completely on my own when I was 5.

Too much concern about safety takes away freedom to experiment and makes the life boring. I wonder at times if that's not where addictions, drug abuse and things root from.

Toys exist in part to teach kids about the real world in ways that are more accessible to them. To blunt all the edges means to lower the effectiveness of that teaching. They do need to be age appropriate, but if you don't learn about the dangers of the world in the protected environment of the home, you WILL learn about them elsewhere and probably with worse consequences.

Lead casting kits, we used to make sinkers to catch fish and later forged coins for pinball machines. However, the stupidest thing we did was break thermometers to play with the mercury and then, sadly, the next step was to see what it felt like in your mouth. I believe in the Irish version of God where he looks after fools and drunks because mercury is poorly absorbed through the digestive tract.

When I was 11 or so, my friend's mom send us out into the yard to play with a BB gun. We were horsing around and he pinged me in the leg. I thought, "What the hell are we doing playing with a gun?" We stopped.